05/26/2014

This is a paper I read at the James Purdy Society session held recently as part of the American Literature Associaton conference.

Out Beyond Satire: James Purdy and Black Humor

Although the term was certainly not new (a book about French fiction exhibiting it had appeared in the 1930s) and had already been used to describe some of the writers included in the anthology, "black humor" as an apt designation for a kind of American fiction being written in the late 1950s and early 1960s arguably can be attributed to a collection of representative selections called, unsurprisingly, Black Humor, published in 1965 and edited by Bruce Jay Friedman (himself a black humorist). The book presents writers other than American, including Celine and J.P. Donleavy, presumably as a way of reinforcing Friedman's own contention in his Foreword that black humor is not a recent or provincial phenomenon, even if the term itself primarily names a movement in recent American fiction. Nevertheless, Friedman's book is now most notable for establishing "black humor" as the critical marker of choice for the increasingly prominent comic novels of the 60s that seemed to gravitate toward a particularly dark, unrelenting kind of comedy.

Certainly Friedman is not prescriptive in his definition of black humor. Indeed, he begins his Foreword by admitting he "would have more luck defining an elbow or a corned-beef sandwich." Friedman does believe that the immediate context for the rise of black humor in fiction is the increasing extremity of social and cultural conditions in the United States in the 1960s (he is writing before the even more extreme developments of the later 1960s), agreeing with the idea that in modern America there is a "fading line between fantasy and reality."

'How does it feel,' the TV boys ask Mrs. Malcolm X when her husband is assassinated. We send our planes off for nice, easygoing, not-too-tough bombing raids on North Vietnam. Sixteen U.S. officers in Germany fly through the night in Klansmen robes and are hauled before their commanding officer to be reprimanded for "poor judgment." It confirms your belief that a new Jack Derbyesque chord of absurdity has been struck in the land, that there is a new mutative style of behavior afoot, one that can only be dealt with by a new, one-foot-in-the-asylum style of fiction.

These conditions defeat the satirist, Friedman argues, so that the comic novelist "has had to sail into darker waters somewhere out beyond satire," and this more adventurous kind of comedy is what Friedman takes to be "black humor."

Friedman's account of black humor as a mode "somewhere out beyond satire" seems to me a perfectly sound way to think about the "black humor fiction of the sixties," as Max Schulz called it in his 1973 book of that title, as does Friedman's sense that black humor fiction is ultimately something you recognize when you see it, not something that needs to be pinned down to the specimen board. Readers today, however, looking back at his collection from a historical perspective that regards Black Humor as a period-specific phenomenon that in hindsight can be delineated more specifically and authoritatively, are likely to find the selection of authors in Black Humor something less than definitive. Heller and Pynchon are certainly appropriate choices, since their work arguably still stands as quintessential black humor. Terry Southern is also correctly included, as is Donleavy, even if his fiction is actually atypical of Irish/British writers of the time. John Barth seems more of a stretch, although the excerpt Friedman chooses is from the one Barth novel that does plausibly exhibit black humor, The Sot-Weed Factor, while Nabokov fits even more uncomfortably, however much we do remember the disturbing humor in Lolita. The current reputations of Charles Simmons and John Rechy are sufficiently removed from the black humor of Heller and Pynchon as to make their appearance in the table of contents seem almost a curiosity, especially given the absence of both Vonnegut and Thomas Berger, perhaps the two most serious omissions from the anthology. And who is Conrad Knickerbocker?

Given the relaxed vigilance with which Friedman patrols the border separating black humor form other forms of adventurous new fiction, it is not exactly surprising to find James Purdy's name in the table of contents as well. Certainly we find in Purdy's early work—the first short stories, the novella 63: Dream Palace, and Malcolm—an often grim humor that is dark and disturbing enough. Malcolm in particular could still credibly be classified as black humor. Still, Purdy's subsequent work clearly came to seem much less appropriately categorized as black humor per se (he is not mentioned in Schulz's book), as the term doesn't seem accurate at all in describing The Nephew or Eustace Chisholm and Works, and while Cabot Wright Begins is undeniably a comic novel, with a premise that in some ways could not be a more outrageous one in which to find "humor," the comedy in this novel does not really exist "somewhere out beyond satire" but is in fact unmistakably satirical in a straightforward kind of way that black humor usually avoids. The satire in this novel is unremittingly savage, but finally this reflects the intensity of Purdy's satirical purpose, which is to point out the folly of just about every social and cultural assumption governing postwar American life.

It is also understandable why Friedman chose the story representing Purdy in the anthology, "Don't Call Me by My Right Name." This story, if not exactly humorous, introduces an immediate incongruity the effects of which produce an escalating series of apparent misunderstandings. Mrs. Klein, formerly Lois McBane, can no longer conceal the fact that "She liked everything about her husband except his name and that had never pleased her."

Lois Klein, she often thought as she lay next to her husband in bed. It is not the name of a woman like myself. It does not reflect my character.

After drinking too much at a party, Lois confides to her husband that she would like him to change his name:

He did not understand. He thought that it was a remark she was making in drink which did not refer to anything concrete, just as once she had said to him, "I want you to begin by taking your head off regularly."

Mrs. Klein can never quite explain, either to her fellow partygoers or to herself, exactly why she doesn't want to be called by her right name, except that "If you all were called Mrs. Klein. . .you would not like to be Mrs. Klein either." Although his immediate response is to disregard his wife's words as the product of drink, Mr. Klein turns very quickly from annoyance to anger and taking her drink from her, he "struck her not too gently over the mouth." That the story erupts suddenly into outright violence after initially establishing a faintly absurdist tone is perhaps what led Bruce Jay Friedman toinclude this story, as the turn of events is decidedly "black," although these days we are not likely to find either Lois Klein's ambivalence about her marital status or her husband's physical abuse to be appropriate sources of laughter. And indeed, it is not likely that Purdy wanted us ultimately to find the story's developments very funny, as Mr. Klein later hits Lois hard enough to send her to the pavement. "You have hurt something in my head, I think," she tells him, and the story concludes with Lois striking her husband back and cursing him.

Read in isolation in 1965, "Don't Call Me By My Right Name" might have seemed at the least to have a kinship with other works being classified as black humor, but read now in the context of Purdy's later fiction we can see more its consistencies with Purdy's body of work as a whole than any allegiance to the black humor movement. Lois Klein will certainly not be the last woman in Purdy's fiction to suffer from a man's lack of comprehension or concern for her emotional well-being (although few of those men will resort to fisticuffs), and Lois's grappling with her sense of identity is of course a common theme in Purdy's work, to be taken up again as soon as Malcolm. The shocking resort to violence will also be featured in some of Purdy's most notorious works as well, most graphically perhaps in Eustace Chisholm and the Works and Narrow Rooms. And surely Lois Klein joins that very long list of Purdy characters who know that things are "not quite right" with themselves and the world they inhabit but can't (in some cases won't) quite express what's wrong and don't exactly know what to do about it. Formally as well, "Don't Call Me by My Right Name" turns out to be quite typical of Purdy's approach to fiction, with its preference for dialogue and a generally restrained kind of narrative exposition, together working to emphasize showing over telling (a method that Purdy pursues in an even more direct way in his concurrent career as a playwright).

Probably even by 1965, discerning readers of his fiction realized that James Purdy could not easily be categorized or labeled, even if he seemed to share with other writers of the 60s a focus on extreme situations and states of being and an often disturbing vision. It might have been the case, however, that the very fact Purdy's work eludes available classifications helps in part to explain why Purdy's work after the 1960s gradually but inexorably lost both readers and critical attention, to the point that by his final years it was justified to say he had been forgotten. If in the 60s and 70s being known as a black humorist was to some extent a way to retain some visibility as representative of a still significant literary movement, when Purdy's work lost salience as black humor, literally knowing how to read it became less certain. Since Purdy could not comfortably be called a postmodernist (while some of his fiction could loosely be called metafictional, including Cabot Wright, much of it could also plausibly qualify as straightforward realism and naturalism), or a magic realist, or a surrealist, or a minimalist, and since neither could Purdy's novels be identified as mainstream "literary fiction," his novels consequently had increasingly weaker appeal to book marketers and reviewers (in Purdy's last years, to publishers as well).

To say that James Purdy's fiction is ultimately truly singular, unclassifiable when considered against the "main currents" of postwar American fiction, is not to insist that his novels and stories cannot among themselves be described in ways that help us assimilate their broadest formal features or grouped together according to shared characteristics and assumptions. In my view, the most enlightening taxonomical scheme is the one proposed by Don Adams, by which he sorts Purdy's fiction into satires, allegorical tragedies, and pastoral romances ("James Purdy's Allegories of Love"). These categories encompass much of Purdy's work from the 1950s and 60s, with 63: Dream Palace and Eustace Chisholm and the Works belonging to the tragedies, Cabot Wright Begins exemplifying satire, and The Nephew representing the first pastoral romance. (Adams discusses In a Shallow Grave as his representative romance, but in my view The Nephew has more than a little in common with this later novel.) An immediate proviso to accepting this typology is that almost all of Purdy's novels incorporate, to one degree or another, all of these modes—the tragedies laced with satire, the romances touched with tragedy, the satires extending to the reader, if not always to the characters, the chance for redemption that is offered to some of the characters in the romances. As Adams puts it, "Purdy's satires attempt to jolt us out of our daze"—being thus jolted an apt description of the condition to which, say, Alma arrives at the conclusion of The Nephew.

If this in indeed a useful perspective from which to consider Purdy's practice as a writer of fiction, surely his work in these three modes is altogether distinctive. If Eustace Chisholm and the Works is a tragedy, its source lies in the violence of Jacobean drama rather than in Shakespeare, and readers could be forgiven if they register less Daniel Haws's role as a tragic hero whose inability to acknowledge his genuine feelings leads to his downfall than the horrific details of Daniel's victimization at the hand of Captain Stadger, himself pathologically self-destructive and in denial of his own nature. Perhaps these readers would find Stadger's actions a graphic demonstration of the consequences of self-denial, although it is likely to seem a bitter lesson that Daniel does not live to apply. Eustace Chisholm may draw on the narrative tradition bequeathed by Greek and Jacobean tragedy, but the way it is used to depict the human propensity to emotional degradation and sadism is pure Purdy. Similarly, readers may have trouble identifying Cabot Wright Begins as satire if they expect the kind of "prescriptive" satire that characterizes the mainstream satirical tradition, which asks us to laugh at human folly in the name of correcting it. Purdy ridicules his characters' folly, but doesn't encourage us to believe it can be corrected. As Susan Sontag wrote in her review of Cabot Wright, "the particularities of social satire [in the novel] are not so particular as they might seem, but rather the vehicle for a universal comic vision. It is a bitter comic vision, in which the flesh is a source of endless grotesqueries, in which happiness and disaster are equally arbitrary and equally unfelt."

Sontag's explication of Purdy's "universal comic vision" indicates that Purdy could at the time still be perceived as at least inhabiting the same literary neighborhood with the black humorists, who also could be said to express such a vision, although the "bitter" comedy of Cabot Wright Begins contrasts with the almost vaudevillian comedy of Heller, Pynchon, or Friedman. Still, the publication of The Nephew four years earlier should certainly have signaled that Purdy had no plans to settle in that neighborhood. "Pastoral romance" in some ways could not be farther removed from "black humor fiction," and The Nephew in fact may be, with the possible exception of In a Shallow Grave, Purdy's gentlest, most hopeful and forgiving novel. The trajectory of Alma Mason's story is toward greater self-understanding, exactly the state that for so many of Purdy's characters is impossible to reach. Alma comes to recognize her own illusions, although the strongest illusion she must learn to see through is the belief that it is possible to genuinely know another human being, even when (perhaps especially when) the "other" is someone like a family member with whom a close relationship is taken for granted. "There's so much we can never know about everything and everybody" Alma confesses near the end of the novel. Alma finally comes to accept this kind of ignorance about her missing-in-action and presumed dead nephew, and if this a difficult acceptance, it does bring Alma a measure of equanimity by the novel's conclusion, one tinged with melancholy, to be sure, as Alma's enlightenment has come late, and she and her brother Boyd are left peacefully to contemplate the encroaching darkness (even while through the window catching the scent of "the faint delicious perfume of azaleas").

I can think of few, if any, other postwar American writers whose work ranges as freely, and as successfully, over all three of these literary modes as does James Purdy's fiction. What makes Purdy's fiction even more singular, however, is that despite the real tonal and formal differences among his novels, they are still of a piece, immediately recognizable as the work of James Purdy. Purdy's novels from 63: Dream Palace to Eustace Chisholm introduce character types—the great lady, the orphan, the failed writer—that will recur throughout his fiction, introducing as well the alternating setting in the predatory city and the deceptively placid countryside, which harbors its own secrets and unleashes its own tempests, and the alternation between past and present (with the former increasingly prominent in the later work). Regardless of setting, the characters suffer from the effects of isolation and abandonment, are driven by needs that are felt but can't be acknowledged or expressed, the latter because language itself is unable to articulate those needs, serving as much to hinder self-comprehension as encourage it and stifling communication between people as much as enabling it. These inadequacies of language (or at least the habitual abuse of it) are literally enacted in the failed writers and failed writing depicted in The Nephew, Cabot Wright Begins, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works, the role of which in linking these novels despite their other differences is examined closely by Tony Tanner in his book, City of Words.

Perhaps the continuities in Purdy's work are easier to see in retrospect, or required a contemporaneous critic especially attuned to Purdy's methods. Certainly the apparently quite radical shift represented by Eustace Chisholm and the Works as the follow-up to Cabot Wright Begins—shifts in mode (satire to allegorical tragedy), setting (from present-day New York to depression-era Chicago), milieu (from the affluent classes and trendy New York publishing to the seedy side of town and its less respectable residents), and, most of all, tenor (from outrageous satirical comedy to a much more muted humor that gradually edges into grim realism and ultimately outright horror) could have seemed so radical—as Cabot Wright was a radical shift from The Nephew—that some readers and critics were led to conclude that Purdy was a mercurial or inconsistent writer whose moves were too elusive to anticipate. The reviewer for the Saturday Review confessed his expectations had been set by Malcolm and The Nephew and that "where we have once found it we want and expect it again and again," finding the "rare experience" he was after in neither Cabot Wright nor Eustace Chisholm. Other reviewers echoed the preference for the earlier books, particularly The Nephew, judging Eustace Chisholm "too baroque" in comparison.

Not all of the reviews were negative, but all of them took note of the fact that this was Purdy's most direct and extended treatment of homosexuality to date. Some of the responses to this aspect of the novel are now quite startling, although perhaps they shouldn't be. Francis Hope, reviewing the novel in the TLS, quotes a line, "Amos adjusted the folds of his scrotum with deliberate ostentation," immediately remarking that this line "might be an allegory of his creator's literary method." In his 1975 Twayne book on Purdy, which generally expresses admiration for Purdy's work, Henry Chupak opines that "Publicity in the last few years has thrown much light on homosexuality and on the attendant circumstances and conditions from which it evolves. And, while thoughtful citizens may become more understanding and more aware of this sexual phenomenon, we query whether a novel almost totally involved with this subject is not inflating an aspect of human existence that is at best only an abnormal sexual experience." It would seem that by 1975 Chupak realized he could not taunt Purdy in quite so brazenly a homophobic way as the TLS reviewer, but instead frames his objection as an aesthetic one, even though his way of voicing it still can't seem to avoid the homophobic cultural assumptions of the time: "So distorted are the sexual relationships in the novel that never once is a normal love affair between a man and a woman portrayed as it might have been to serve as a contrast."

This sort of queasiness about the now forthright portrayal of homosexual characters in his fiction no doubt contributed to the increasingly restricted coverage of new work by Purdy after Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Unfortunately, while it might have been expected that Purdy would receive added attention as a "gay writer" from gay-themed and gay-friendly publications, Purdy's own refusal to identify himself as a gay writer, along with the tendency of gay characters in his fiction to have the same flaws and weaknesses as other human beings, and to sometimes behave quite badly indeed, meant that his work did not exactly gain the approval of what would become the gay literary establishment and only recently has really received attention from gay and lesbian studies scholars. As Purdy's last editor wrote in Lambda Literary last December, "his books were sometimes considered too queer for straight people but not queer enough for gay people." Purdy coveted his status as an outsider, but he must have known that so steadfastly pursuing such an uncompromising vision for so long was going to leave his work far enough outside all official measures of acceptability that seeing it ignored and neglected was almost inevitable. If not all of Purdy's fiction after the 60s would focus on "abnormal sexual experience," it already had a sufficient reputation for emphasizing the perceived "abnormal" (not just regarding gay people) that this continued to be the primary legacy of Purdy's work of the 1960s, however inadequate such a perception is in appreciating the fictional world he creates. If "black humor" is finally not exactly true to the unsettling character of that world, to describe it as merely concerned with the aberrant or the freakish is not really to recognize it at all.

If I were teaching a course on "black humor fiction of the sixties," I would probably include Malcolm on my syllabus. Although Adams classifies it as a satire, it does nevertheless seem to me that here Purdy is working "somewhere out beyond satire." The satirical element in this novel is incidental to the thoroughly caustic portrayal of the characters, each of whom is introduced as someone who might help Malcolm find his "place" in the world in which he is the eternal orphan, but instead through their self-involved, predatory behavior exemplify why there can be no place in their world for one as radically innocent as Malcolm, except as prey. Stories of innocence lost depict innocence confronting the inherent corruptions of the world of human experience, but in Malcolm the corruption is pervasive, inflicted on Malcolm by the very people who would be providing him guidance in his journey of self-discovery. For all their surface eccentricities, none of these characters are portrayed as intrinsically evil, which would reduce the narrative to melodrama. They are, sadly, all-too-human.

The complicating factor in considering Malcolm is that if Malcolm is indeed on a journey of self-discovery, it is not finally certain that he truly has a self to discover. Malcolm is sufficiently a cipher that it is difficult to feel either pity for him or anger at him as his picaresque story unfolds and he fails to find either meaning or contentment in the relationships formed with the people he meets. Purdy deliberately induces this effect, putting us at a distance from a character whose ultimate fate thus seems quite horrifying to be sure, but in another way the episodes chronicling Malcolm's progression toward his fate are also farcical, especially in retrospect. Malcolm is presented to us as a blank slate on which the world might write, but in the way James Purdy appears to refrain from inscribing very deeply on that slate himself, we are left unsure whether the world has simply defaced it with its chaotic script, or whether the slate actually remains blank, because finally it resists all efforts to fill it.

05/20/2014

(This review appears in the current issue of American Book Review (unavailable online) No. 35, Issue 2.)

Arguably what has over the past 50 years been called "experimental" fiction is inherently a "conceptual" fiction. The efforts among such postwar American writers as John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Raymond Federman to question established norms and to extend the formal possibilities of fiction challenged readers to put aside the assumption that a work of fiction is identical with its "story," which in turn enlists "character," "setting" and "theme" to give it substance. Not all readers would necessarily describe their expectations in this way, nor cling rigidly to them, but even the innovations of modernism (which arguably only altered perceptions of how plots could be organized and characters presented) did not finally overturn assumptions about the centrality of narrative as the default structural principle of fiction.

Writers like Sorrentino and Federman contest these assumptions by disrupting complacent reading habits and substituting for the formal structure provided by narrative (a structure that pretends to be no structure at all but instead the embodiment of fiction in its natural state) an alternative form created for this particular work, whose "concept" the reader must ultimately grasp in order to affirm the work's aesthetic integrity. Inveterate experimental writers such as these essentially attempt to reinvent "form" with each new work, requiring that readers regard literary form (at least in fiction, although the stakes are the same in poetry as well) as perpetually unsettled, always subject to revision and re-creation. Most readers of fiction, of course, remain unwilling to relinquish their inherited conception of form as something already known, an established paradigm by which to judge the work's "success," and so experimental or adventurous writers must still attempt to break through ingrained reading habits by, if necessary, rudely interrupting them.

Perhaps it is the persistence of these passive reading habits, despite the efforts of various outlaws, absurdists, metafictionists, and other assorted postmodernists, that accounts for the appearance of a more direct form of conceptualism in Davis Schneiderman's [SIC], as well as his previous novel, Blank. (INK, the third book in a conceptualist trilogy, is scheduled for publication in 2014.) Both books bring to fiction the programmatic conceptualism that has featured prominently in Amerian art since Joseph Kosuth's 1969 manifest, "Art After Philosophy," and that more recently has been rather flamboyantly adapted to poetry by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Blank is a series of pages that are, well, blank except for a few pages with chapter titles on which the blank pages refuse to elaborate. Schneiderman has said of the book that it "takes as its starting point that there is no starting point. . .this is literature that exceeds its frame and grows to encompass and then process its own discussions" and that it is "a conceptual work that allows you an entry point into a world beyond realist and experimental/innovative literature. This is conceptual work that responds to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art" (The Nervous Breakdown, April 26, 2011)

While such remarks surely do manifest a kind of postironic glibness that warns us not to take them altogether seriously, finally we have to accept that the provocation of Blank is indeed directed toward the purposes Schneiderman describes here, or the book threatens to become merely a joke (although we should not underestimate the extent to which it is indeed intended partly as a joke). No doubt Schneiderman does want us to think of his book as going "beyond" both "realist and experimental/innovative literature" and to regard its "content" as radically indeterminate (if it can be said to have content). That the book is meant as a response "to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art" is somewhat vague—What kind of response? To what feature of contemporary art that makes it "alienating"?—but more generally this notion that art is fundamentally a response to the nature of art is one of the controlling ideas behind conceptual art going back at least to Kosuth (who himself argues it goes back to Duchamp). Presumably Schneiderman wants us in particular to have in mind the "character" of contemporary fiction (especially in its "literary" version), but the moves he makes in describing his "conceptual book" are recognizably those associated with conceptualism.

Blank certainly follows the central principle associated with conceptual art: once we have identified its motivating concept, we have appreciated its "art," which has almost nothing to do with execution, with the way the writer works with the "materials" at hand. We do not judge this book by its artful disposition of words, since it contains none (aside from the chapter headings, which more call attention to the absence of words than furnish us with a few scarce specimens). [SIC] is equally conceptual, although in this case the text is full of words, except that none of them have been written by the author. (He does conspicuously lay claim to them, nonetheless.) Part 1 of the book consists of a series of appropriated canonical literary works, proceeding in a more or less chronological sequence, form "Caedmon's Hymn" to Joyce's Ulysses, each work presented as "by Davis Schneiderman." Part 2 is a "translation" of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," although it is actually a transformation of the text through several different languages as produced by an online translation program. Part 3 consists of a miscellany of documents produced since 1923 (the cutoff date for determining the "public domain"), including Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, a recipe for a "1943 Victory Cake," the source code for the Melissa virus, and the first 30 Tweets—all again putatively "by Davis Schneiderman."

Thus while [SIC] unlike Blank seems to provide a text we might read (a text composed of other texts), it turns out to be one we don't need to read. Again once we have assimilated the underlying concept bringing the texts together, unless we would like, say, to re-read Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for its own sake, we have little reason to do more than skim through the book's pages to get its "point." [SIC] is an implicit critique of copyright, of the "ownership" of writing and the taboo of plagiarism. Conversely, one might see it as the celebration of the possibilities of appropriation, a kind of literary remixing. Finding this critique satisfying must finally depend on the extent to which the reader also finds him/herself in sympathy with the philosophy of artistic appropriation and considers the product of such appropriation compelling as a work of art, since there are otherwise no aesthetic standards against which a book like this can be measured. Certainly there are many readers who would find this sort of thing simply irrelevant to art, perhaps its very antithesis. Others would just as surely defend it as a necessary tonic against bloated claims on behalf of "originality" and a challenge to us to think seriously about what we do expect of art.

I myself do not find originality an altogether empty term, at least if we concede that originality in art or literature is always a relative claim, a perception that a specific work or writer has exploited a formal possibility not previously so fully realized or produced effects with language so well-rendered, not an assertion that something wholly new, unconstrained by convention or uninfluenced by other artists and the history of the form, has been created or is even possible. Davis Schneiderman would likely deny that in its way his book aspires to originality, but it seems to me that it asks to be taken as original in the most radical sense, a book so utterly removed from the ordinary practices of "literary fiction" that it is a work of art on its own terms, not on those tied to existing formal requirements or to literary history. It seeks to be regarded as sui generis, a book that can be judged only by the criteria its sets up for itself. However, if there are few, if any, touchstones in previous fiction by which to assess it, [SIC] is recognizable enough as a fellow traveler with conceptualism in contemporary art, as well as with the escapades of Goldsmith. In this context, [SIC] can't really be called original (save perhaps in bringing conceptualism to fiction), but, more importantly, it's really not that interesting, either.

Finally it is rather hard to know why we shouldn't prefer a straightforward nonfiction polemic against the ill effects of copyright (including its perpetuation of the myth of "ownership," of "intellectual property") over the more indirect version of this critique as found in [SIC]. In some ways a writer like Davis Schneiderman performs a worthwhile enough service in reminding even those of us who favor experimental writing that we can still impose too many formal requirements on a work of fiction, and "The Borges Transformations" is a provocative demonstration of the inherent instability of meaning in any text. But in essentially reducing the scope of his iconoclasm to a secondary role that primarily reinforces what the book wants to "say" about the subject it indirectly raises, [SIC] almost negates whatever adventurous impulse might seem to animate a work ostensibly so unconventional. Such didacticism only makes experimental fiction a means of achieving the sort of conventional goal—in this case, communicating a "theme"—emphasized by the "realist" fiction to which it is supposed to be an alternative.

05/18/2014

Responding to the latest iteration of the perennial argument that "the novel is dead," David Ulin appropriately dismisses the notion that the "literary novel," now in its death throes, was still culturally healthy as recently as the 1980s. (Maybe I just missed that while I was otherwise diverting myself in graduate school.) But Ulin just redates literary fiction's last period of cultural relevance: "for me, you have to go back to 1950s, or even earlier--Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 1920s and 1930s, not only novelists but also household names."

This is a myth. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not household names, although Hemingway did because of his extra-literary activities manage to become better known than almost any other serious American writer of the 20th century. Hemingway was an outlier, however. Fitzgerald's first book was popular, but his subsequent books were much less so, and by the time of his death he was almost forgotten. (The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure and was by no means universally praised by critics.) Our romanticizing of "Paris in the 20s" obscures the fact that at the time, American culture at large was indifferent to the whole thing.

Faulkner worked in almost complete obscurity during the 1930s, the most artistically fruitful period of his career. Nathanael West was ignored, except by B-movie producers. Zora Neale Hurston was unknown among most readers, and her fiction even among African-American readers and critics was frequently dismissed. Dos Passos's USA trilogy was hardly competition for MGM and Warner Brothers in attracting audience's attention.

If we still have the impression that the 1950s was a friendly time for the serious novel, this is mostly because our perception is filtered through the critical commentary of the time, commentary by prominent critics such as the New York Intellectuals, whose legacy endures. That this legacy remains alive, however, is mainly due to the contrast it provides to the current critical scene. The late 1940s and the 1950s was a time when serious literary criticism still appeared in general-interest publications that avoided both the hermetic preoccupations of academic criticism and the superficialities of newspaper reviewing. These kinds of publications no longer exist (efforts are being made to re-create them online), and thus if a golden age has been lost, it is this age of consequential literary criticism that has passed. That the Los Angeles Times is now what passes for an authoritative source of critical discourse is itself a sad commentary on current literary culture.

Ulin himself seems to realize this, as he laments our situation: "Amid all the noise, who, really, can get noticed? And how long can such notice last?" If the need is to "get noticed" by the Los Angeles Times or The Colbert Show, no doubt the task seems overwhelming. But the actual need is for writers to get noticed by readers, not publicists, readers who will take their work seriously. For this task, critics are needed who can alert such readers to writing worth taking seriously, perhaps even to show why "notice" of some work might "last." If Ulin means to confess that the current state of literary criticism is such that it isn't up to the task, he's probably right, but the solution to this is not to assume that nothing lasts, but to advocate for better literary criticism.

Ulin's despair at the prospect of writers gaining notice (an odd stance for a book critic, really) leads to his disdain for the idea that writers might write for "posterity," which is a "fool's game." Since the writer is apparently left hopeless between the impossibility of finding an audience now and the oblivion that substitutes for posterity, the only justification left is an egocentric one: "the only reason to write is self-expression." This is a peculiarly American notion, that art is a form of "self-expression," good as therapy or asserting one's presence in the world.

I am unaware, however, of any great writer who wrote out of the desire for "self-expression," except in the most obvious sense that some writers, like some artists generally, seem compelled to practice their art. Expression of the art form's possibilities is the goal, not some amorphous emanation of the "self." Most great writers of the past would have been appalled to learn they had been engaged in "self-expression," among other reasons because they wouldn't have known how self-expression could be evaluated. Most of these writers would have indeed been writing for posterity, the harshest but most respected critic of all, whose positive judgment was vastly more prized than the "fleeting conceit" of self-expression.